Tuesday, September 17, 2013

More Radcliffe on Ginsberg

Trying not to burden you all too much with this (the guy, after all, is
giving - and will be giving - plenty of interviews, in advance of, and doing
the publicity for, his upcoming movie) - Daniel Radcliffe is Allen Ginsberg! - But, (from Yahoo movies blog), we thought
to run this, considering it's so specifically Ginsberg-centric (and in case you
haven’t seen it).

Interviewer: Tell us about how you stepped into the sensible shoes of the young
Allen Ginsberg the year he entered Columbia University?

Daniel Radcliffe: The
first point of reference for me was his diaries. He had quite extensive diaries that he kept from a very young age.
They gave me some very great insight into him for this period. After that, the
other stuff was working on the voice and the accent, and work on his
physicality. And then the final piece of it was the contact lenses, and the
glasses and the permed hair...

Interviewer: Did you get Ginsberg’s signature buck teeth? [sic]

DR: No I didn’t. We did something to the lips,
slightly filled them out, because he did have really full lips. We didn’t get
mine to the place his were. That would have looked ridiculous.

Interviewer: What was it like looking in the mirror in character?

DR: Looking at yourself in the mirror, and then
seeing somebody that doesn’t look like yourself, is very liberating for an
actor. It definitely makes you feel very free.

DR: Well the rhythm is there, and his poetry came
about at a time when people had become so dogmatic about rhyming and meter. But
it really was something to rebel against, because, you know, the best poets
also know when not to use it. You can play around with that.

Interviewer: One of the defining facts of his life, and one that comes through in "Kill Your Darlings," is the impact his mother's mental illness had on him.

DR: His relationship with his mother, as it is
with so many men, not just Jewish men, was an incredibly formative one in his
life. In particular, it was such a strained relationship, and his mother was so
disturbed for so much of his youth. One of the things in the film, one of the
things that are important to anyone growing up, is moving beyond your parents.
And that's a very hard thing, particularly in certain religious families that
are very dogmatic and prescribed about the kind of path they want their
children to go on. And becoming a poet certainly isn’t in any Jewish mother or
father’s top five things they want for their son [editorial note - Allen's father, Louis, was, of course, himself a poet]